Interactions.org Newsdigest 28 April 2009
Updated: 2010-07-31 18:52:08
-- Antimatter mysteries 2: How do you make antimatter? -- The great data explosion -- Big Bang machine detectors will be 'even more perfect' -- Particle physics study finds new data for extra Z-bosons and potential fifth force of nature -- That Other Theory - Loop Quantum Gravity -- Officials to break ground on cutting-edge international physics lab in Northern Minnesota

Exploring our dark universe is usually the domain of extreme physics. Clues to dark matter and energy are searched for by huge neutrino telescopes and particle detectors, deep underground, and by experiments launched into space. But an experiment doesn't have to be exotic to explore the unexplained. At the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which ends today in Paris, scientists from the GammeV-CHASE experiment unveiled the first results from their experiment, which used 30 hours' worth of data from a 10-meter-long experiment to place the world's best limits on particles of dark energy.
CERN's press release issued today states that the LHC's first measurements are allowing them to “rediscover” the Standard Model of particle physics. But the presentations at ICHEP tell a slightly different story.
Everyone's catching Higgs fever, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The elusive particle - and the race between the experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron and those at the Large Hadron Collider to discover it - have made headlines for years, but the frenzy reached new heights in the run-up to the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
It might be a long way to the top, but the LHC experiments are already half way there: at the ICHEP conference in Paris CMS and ATLAS presented their first candidates for top quark, the heaviest particle in the Standard Model.